Applications with PNG Support

Maintenance Note

The PNG-supporting applications and toolkits pages are no longer being
actively updated; for several years already, it's been safe to assume
that virtually any bitmap-capable image app supports PNG. Corrections are still
welcome, particularly for "repurposed domains" (park-spam), but
new applications are no longer being added.

For those of you who simply wish to buy a commercial application or download
a zipfile full of executables and start looking at or making pictures, the
pages below have pointers to a large number of applications that are known
to support PNG in one form or other, or that are going to support PNG in the
near future. Some of the programs (particularly those for Unix) are provided
as source code and may require libpng and/or zlib (see
PNG Source Code and Libraries), but often even
these have pre-built binaries for popular systems somewhere nearby.

Also take a look at the W3C's page of
PNG testimonials for
the official word from companies like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Agfa.

Note that there is a fair amount of overlap between the editors
and converters categories; editors that are capable of saving
in multiple formats can also be used to convert between image formats.
The same is true for some image viewers.

In addition, the following pages list some specialized PNG-supporting
applications:

Of the apps listed so far, many (though not most) appear to use the free
zlib library but independent (non-libpng) implementations of
the PNG code. Bugs have been noted where known, but don't take any of this
as gospel truth; new releases occur all the time, and many bugs in older
versions are fixed in later ones. Life is full of change and uncertainty.

(Big thanks to everyone who has provided Greg with pointers and
corrections to these pages!)